


Diminish and Return

by tempus_teapot (dreadnot)



Category: Dragon Age
Genre: Blood Magic, M/M, non-con
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-04-30
Updated: 2011-04-30
Packaged: 2017-10-19 07:48:58
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,476
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/198572
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dreadnot/pseuds/tempus_teapot
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Blood mage Hawke exacts his revenge on Anders for rejecting him after his deal with Torpor. Written for a kmeme prompt, distinctly non-consensual.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Diminish and Return

_“I will not be with a man who would sell out himself and an innocent for personal gain. Since you’re both on such good terms with demons, perhaps Merrill would be more receptive to your advances.”_

Hard words spoken at a hard time, from one mage to another.

Those words returned to Varron over and over as his life moved forward on its inexorable course toward the abyss of Flemeth’s prediction. He thought of them when Anders asked him for his help with Ser Alrik.

 _Too good to consort with the blood mage except when it’s for your personal gain?_

But Varron helped him, despite his usual policy of only killing people if he got paid for it. He did not understand it himself.

Why? Why did he look at the mage and burn to touch him? Why would he find himself with his fists clenched in the man’s presence? Nails biting into his palms to keep himself from reaching out to grasp Anders’ arm. He wanted to kiss him until he gave those gasping moans Varron remembered, the ones that echoed in his head deep in the night when he would wake with his fist clenched around his own cock, dreaming of a man who wanted nothing from him but to use him.

How did the man who spurned him have such a hold on him that a pleading look could make him turn from the steady course of self-interest that had served him his whole life?

He wanted to devour him if only to keep Anders from devouring his soul and his heart first.

So again, when Anders pleaded with him for help finding sela petrae and drakestone, Varron considered denying him. He could hear the lie in his justifications and attempts to dodge Varron’s questions.

He temporized. He would help Anders, he said, when he had time. There were always so many demands on the Champion’s time. So many people who would offer coin, connections, even their bodies for help from the man who had saved Kirkwall.

He ground home the idea of thankful men and women giving themselves to him in exchange for his strength and searched Anders’ face for some flicker of… anything. Anything but the derision he saw, an expression that drove him out of Anders’ clinic without a look back.

He used the time to do his own researches. Sela petrae and drakestone, he found, were ingredients in a powerful magical explosive. The explosive was to the fell grenades Varron loved what a mage child’s first spark of fire was to the raging hellstorm a mage fully grown into his powers could summon.

The night he read that in a book Tomwise had traded to him in exchange for a dragon’s fire gland, he felt the slow smolder of his rage catch flame.

 _Hypocrite._

Any misguided admiration he had for Anders evaporated in the heat of love gone to hate.

  


~ ~ ~

  


  
“You’re here,” Anders said, looking up when Varron strode through the door into his clinic. “I still need your help.”

“With your bomb?” Varron asked and watched the color drain from Anders’ face.

“My—”

“Bomb,” Varron finished, moving closer, pushing into the other mage’s personal space. “Or did you need some _other_ help from the blood mage?”

He poked a finger in the center of Anders’ chest. “Who am I helping you kill, Anders?” He pushed harder, forcing Anders back a step to release the pressure. “Meredith?” He pushed again, not using magic, not using more than a single finger, letting his rage push Anders back another step rather than physical force.

 

“It’s fine to use me, is it?” he snarled. “After all, I’m just a blood mage, right? I’ve never done a thing for you. _Right?”_

Anders raised his hands, his expression a wretched mix of guilt and defiance, resignation and the first bloom of his own anger.

“Why do you care?” Anders snapped back. “Is it the money? Fame?” He stumbled back another step and caught himself against the wall while he jerked his coin purse from his belt and threw it at Varron. “Here’s your money. Now help me or don’t.”

Varron let the purse bounce off his chest and drop to the floor at his feet.

He ignored it while he slipped the knife from his belt, palming it in his left hand while he raised his right fist as though to strike Anders.

When Anders raised his arm to block the punch, Varron brought the knife up to slash across the man’s warding hand, cutting deep, loosing a spray of blood that struck his face, stained his robes, and pattered against the ground almost instantly.

While Anders was still frozen in shock, Varron thrust the bloodied blade through his own palm and joined his blood to the flow of Anders’. The pain was a bolt of lightning up his arm, but the hot, angry magic he joined with it turned the lightning to a singing power that flew from him to strike Ander’s bloodied hand and race into his veins, his heart, his limbs, his very mind.

The world stopped around them, the air thrummed with power, tasted of ozone, smelled of copper and hate, grew so thick around them that the rain of blood halted, droplets hanging motionless in midair in a scarlet curtain.

 _“Mine,”_ Varron hissed, leaning in to see the flare of fear and foreign magic tear across Anders’ face.

The first backlash staggered him. The frozen droplets suddenly bursting into crystals of magic and alien censure.

“Justice.” Varron bared his teeth in a merciless grin while Anders turned eyes radiant with the Fade up at him. “I was expecting you.”

He jerked the knife out of his palm with a shout of triumph and hate before he slammed his gouting hand into Anders’ throat. Crackling red lightning spread, dancing over the blue fissures of Fade energy that were opening in Anders’ skin.

The battle of energies looked as though it should be noisy. There should be hisses, explosions, at least screams or shouts from the two men, but it was deathly silent.

Where blue fissures opened, Varron poured blood magic into them, infiltrating so deep into Anders’ body and soul that Justice found himself retreating deeper and deeper into his host until the blood mage bound the Fade spirit in chains wrought of Anders’ own life force.

When the last tracery of Fade light was extinguished, Varron let Anders drop to the floor and pulled a rag from his belt to wrap his pierced hand.

“You thought you knew how to resist blood magic,” he said contemptuously to the fallen mage. “But I am no Idunna.” Varron left Anders slumped against the wall while he closed and dropped the bar on the clinic door. His hand shot lightning bolts of agony all the way to his shoulder, using the bones as conductors, but he gave little indication of it while he used his uninjured hand to pull a crate over to give him a place to sit and observe Anders.

Anders remained where he had fallen, face slack and confused. His eyes wandered the room, settling on familiar objects while his brows puckered in perplexity. Varron watched him attempt to make sense of whatever it was – a crate, a barrel, a cot – until, forgetting his original intent, his gaze slid on to something else.

Minutes ago this beautiful, dumb creature had been a powerful mage and former Gray Warden, now he was pretty property. Varron felt his cock stir knowing that Anders was his pretty property.

“I could leave you like this,” Varron said and Anders’ eyes tracked up to him for the first time. “Lost in your own head.” He looked down at his hand, which throbbed with every beat of his heart. “And useless.”

He chuckled darkly to himself. “Well, mostly useless.”

His hand pulsed its ache up the length of his arm, reminding him that there were other matters to attend to before he could play.

“Did you know,” he said conversationally as he dipped his fingers in the blood from his hand, “that a blood mage cannot use normal healing while he holds his blood magic at the ready?”

He used a wet finger to paint runes in the air, leaving the blood hanging in twisting sigils after his finger moved on.

“But that doesn’t mean we cannot heal.”

This was so much better than the quick and dirty magic he used in combat, so much more precise. He scanned the floating sigils to ensure they were perfect before sending them spinning with a flick of his finger.

The sigils whirled in the air before winking out of existence with a _snap_ of static electricity, leaving the air heavy with the scent of copper and a rotted taste on Varron’s tongue.

Even in his confusion, Anders grunted at the wound that opened in his right palm.

“Hurts, doesn’t it?” Varron commented, flexing his own hand and holding it out to admire the completeness of his work. Under the blood that turned his hand into a sticky mess, the hole in his palm was gone.

He returned to his contemplation of Anders. His plan past this point had been fractured at best, mostly a red haze of anger and a need for vengeance for all the slights he’d taken at the man’s hands over the years. He had pictured taking him against the wall, making him bleed, making him beg for more with the hooks of magic in his blood.

He had pictured Anders following obediently at his heel. He had imagined tears and pain and some resolution to what had festered since the man’s rejection.

He had not pictured sitting and watching the object of his obsession sprawled like one of those Orlesian string puppets after the strings were cut.

He shook his head at himself, of course Anders’ strings had been cut, but Varron had replaced them with new ones of his own devising, all at the end of hooks dug into blood and soul. All he had to do was…

 _…pluck._

Anders sucked in a breath and dug his feet into the floor as though to push himself through the wall and away from Varron. Through the blood ties between them, Varron felt him try to reach for his magic only to fumble where he thought it should be and find nothing. His mouth opened to say something, probably a curse, but Varron closed his throat. There was nothing Anders could say yet that he wanted to hear.

He clucked his tongue. “Too late for that.”

He crooked a finger at the man and pulled with his will. He was still feeling his way around Anders’ mind, considering his options for more subtle workings, but making him crawl forward to rub his cheek against Varron’s knee was even easier than getting a Carta assassin to turn on his own people.

He idly ran his fingers through Anders’ hair, smoothing it, leaving streaks of blood to mar the pale gold. It was almost right, but not quite; Anders was looking up at him with something like hate, and that didn’t fit his fantasies.

Well, not all of them.

He took a potion vial from his belt and flicked off the top with his thumb before holding it to Anders’ lips. “Drink, and then I will allow you to speak to answer my questions.”

Varron watched Anders’ eyes, the only place the man could show his emotions as he compliantly drank down the healing potion whether he wanted to or not. His eyes narrowed, widened, and finally closed as though to shut out what he was doing.

Varron remembered the feeling of being manipulated by another’s will. Idunna, Exotic Wonder from the East – also known as the Tramp from Darktown – had wielded her blood magic with all the subtlety of a drunk mabari, but she had still managed to get Varron to put his own knife to his throat. He had hated it then; he didn’t imagine Anders liked it now.

Once Anders finished the healing potion, Varron examined his hand to ensure that the wound was healed. He turned Anders’ hand palm up and stroked his fingertips over the unbroken but bloodied skin. He remembered these hands, remembered them moving reverently over his body, tracing lines of muscle and sinew, wrapping his cock in long, strong fingers…..

He pushed the memories away in favor of immediacy.

“You want to tell me the truth now,” he said in a voice cold enough to chill the heat of the memories.

To think, he had agreed to allow this man to move into his home. At least that had not happened before Anders rejected him.

“What is the bomb for?” he asked, loosing the stranglehold on Anders’ voice while tugging at the hooks in his mind with no thought to sparing him pain.

Anders whimpered because Varron would not let him scream, and sobbed into his knee when the pain receded.

Varron fisted his fingers in Anders’ hair to raise his face and leaned in to growl, “What is the bomb for?”

 _He pulled the hooks tight on Anders’ will, feeling the struggle as a mélange of sensations – taste of cloying bitter fear, sharp burst of resolve like a spray of citrus scent, cries of no! no! no! the mage’s attempt to deny him, cat’s tongue scrape of Anders’ will against his, the hooks sinking deeper, dragging tearing all in a synesthetic cacophony that only approximated a mage’s true perception of the moment._

And if he left Anders’ mind in tatters? He didn’t need the man whole. He wasn’t even sure he _wanted_ the man whole.

“What is the bomb for?”

“The Chantry,” Anders gasped, defeated before the fight ever really started. “To stop the endless cycle of promising change only to return to the status quo or worse than the status quo.”

“You were going to use me to help you start a war?” Varron asked, incredulous despite himself, fingers fisting unconsciously in Anders’ hair until the man whimpered in protest.

“Yes,” Anders whispered.

Varron stared at him in disbelief before starting to laugh. It wasn’t a pleasant laugh, all jagged edges that seemed to tear in his throat.

“To think,” he said, looking down at Anders, “I just did something to help Kirkwall and I can’t even take credit for it.”

He would just have to take his reward in other ways.

“Tell me what you most fear,” he murmured, pulling the hooks tight again.Varron could feel Anders tracking the question and sifting through which answer was the right one. Many people never took the time to analyze and pick out their greatest fears, Varron gave the man time to consider.

Finally he licked his lips and said tentatively, “Being alone.”

That was unexpected. Varron had been expecting Tranquility to be the top of Anders’ list. After all, the mage isolated himself from most people outside of his duties to the clinic and its patients.

Rather than ask, he tugged with the magic until Anders explained. “I was put in solitary confinement after one of my escapes from the Circle,” he said, speaking to Varron’s knee instead of looking up to meet his eyes. “For a year. And then, after Justice….” He dropped his head and shook it. “I haven’t been alone since then. Not for a moment.”

Varron filed that away. It was useful, but he wasn’t about to let Anders off with just extended solitary confinement with his companion spirit locked away from contact. Maybe later, when he started to get bored.

“What else?” he asked. “Besides being alone?”

“Failure,” Anders replied, this answer coming more easily, as though it was a fear that weighed on his mind more constantly.

“In what?”

“Failing in bringing justice to the mages of Thedas. I’m ready to give my life to help mages live free of the Circles.”

Varron rolled his eyes. Maker, but the sincerity was almost nauseating.

“What else?”

Anders’ shoulders trembled now. “Tranquility.”

Now that might be something he could work with. He used only his will to make Anders look up at him again. “You’re afraid of losing your magic or afraid of losing who you are?”

“They’re the same thing,” Anders replied, meeting his gaze with a haunted expression. “We aren’t separate. That’s why you have become more and more cruel the more you learn of blood magic. I loved you before you lost yourself to it.”

Varron glared and wrenched at the hooks until Anders opened his mouth in a silent scream, his throat closed again by the magic that held him as helpless as a child.

“Get up.” He jerked Anders up by the hooks, once again reminding him of some Orlesian puppet.

 _I loved you…._

“You loved _me?”_ he snarled and dug in harder, watching Anders jerk on his feet with the effort of screaming without sound. There was satisfaction to be had in the agony of his expression, but not enough. He stood up to strike the mage across the face and watched him stagger back.

“I should break your mind until you aren’t even as functional as a Tranquil!” He shoved him with both hands, sending him reeling backward into the wall. “You loved _me?”_ he repeated.

He caught himself. He was panting with his fury and shouting at the man.

No, he would not cede the power in this situation to Anders with his rage.

He sat down again and took a deep breath to calm himself. Anders slowly straightened up, making no effort to wipe the blood off his split lip.

Varron wanted to lick it away and bite to make him make those strangled pain sounds. He was starting to come around to an idea, but not yet.

“Strip.”

Anders eyes widened even as his hands moved obediently to unclasp the chain that held his pauldrons, dropping them to the floor before sliding his coat off his shoulders.

“I wouldn’t dare?” Varron asked. “Is that what you’re thinking? I wouldn't dare force you because you _loved_ me?” He put a hard emphasis on the past tense, spitting out the word. “Or maybe you think _I_ loved you?”

Anders winced at the jibe while his hands continued their task of stripping his clothes and boots away until he stood nude in front of Varron.

He had not changed much since Varron had last seen him without clothes. Perhaps a bit thinner, a few more scars, and his genitals were as soft and fragile as any man’s when he was cold and not aroused, but Varron's memory still supplied the feel of his skin under his fingertips, still brought back the taste the salt of his sweat, still reminded him of Anders' gasps and groans against his lips, even after all the years that had passed.

The memories stirred more than anger and hate in him for the first time since he had come to the clinic. They stirred a lust to have something long gone.

What he felt looking at Anders was love gone as sour and curdled as old milk, but he was willing to choke it down even knowing he would only come out the other side sicker and emptier.

Wordlessly he started to rifle through the tendrils of control he had over Anders’ mind and body. It wasn’t enough to simply force him to bring himself off while Varron watched for the sake of the humiliation, the blood mage was searching for the hooks that would make him enjoy it.

To start, the easy strings to pull were the ones that had him touch himself. He propped his ankle on his knee and hungrily watched Anders cup his balls in one hand, lifting them, squeezing gently while he took the head of his cock between finger and thumb to stroke, still-loose skin moving easily under his touch.

It wouldn’t have been enough just on his own, given the circumstances, naked and shivering in Darktown’s clammy chill. Anders could have gone through the motions all night without getting off, but Varron had not stopped his explorations of Anders’ mind, fingers now stroking through memories of stolen moments and warm bodies.

Varron couldn’t see the memories, but in that same strange synesthetic way that he had won their battle of wills before, he could feel them, taste moans, hear the bitter bite of semen on Anders’ tongue, smell the delight of seeing a new lover naked and spread out to explore.

Those were the places he drew the hooks tight and Anders’ body reacted.

His cock grew thicker, longer in his hand until he could take a moment to lick his palm, using the saliva to slick it before he started to thrust into his fist in earnest.

Varron ran his tongue over his lips and leaned forward intently, his focus shifting from the display of Anders pleasuring himself to the man’s face, gauging his expression as it slipped farther away from fear and shame into an almost wanton disregard for their situation.

He knew when he had found the right hooks when Anders’ head fell back and he let out a drawn out moan. He rolled his hips, fucking his hand like a lover, his thumb smoothing over the head to pick up the slick pre-ejaculate to rub onto his shaft on the downstroke.

Every motion made Varron ache, this time in a perfect, anticipatory way. He wanted this man in his bed again.

He rose from the barrel and moved to replace Anders’ hand with his own, smoothing his other hand down the man’s bare back.

It was Varron’s name Anders cried out when he spilled hot in his hand before Varron fisted his fingers in his hair and muffled his cries with a kiss that had nothing to do with tenderness and everything to do with ownership.There were people who would probably lament that this false passion from Anders was empty and meaningless. They obviously did not understand how to find the sweetness in victory and in vengeance.

Anders’ mouth tasted of blood from his split lip, but he returned Varron’s kiss as ardently as the first time they had kissed there in the clinic. His response was everything Varron had dreamed of in the angry nights and years since Anders’ rejection.

Better still, Anders remembered it. Varron could feel that through the blood ties that he had bound the man in, he could feel Anders remembering and he tugged again, harder, laying the hooks into those emotions as deep as he could set them.

He didn’t care if he ripped Anders’ psyche to shreds. He wanted… everything.

And Anders gave it to him, turning in his arms to press against him. His mouth was still bloodied, his breaths coming in gasps, his hands clenching, clutching, digging into Varron’s robes, kneading his back, raking through his hair.

Varron broke away first with a laugh hoarse with desire and triumph.

“I should have done this years ago.”

Anders tried to kiss him again, but Varron swatted his ass and pushed him back. “Get me something so I can fuck you properly.”

While Anders hurried to comply, Varron removed his smalls, but left his robe on. Anders held out a pot of salve to him when he returned, goose pimpled and shivering in the cold room. Watching Anders go from defiant and hateful to this eager desperation to please him had him so hard that he doubted he would last long.

How fortunate that this was about his pleasure and not the other man’s.

He dipped his fingers in the pot and lifted his robe to rub it onto his cock, hissing with a combination of pleasure and a need so intense that it almost hurt to touch himself.

“Against the wall.” Maker, but it was heady to just give orders and see Anders scamper. He put his hands against the wall and Varron used a hand on his shoulders to make him bend, kicking his feet apart with his boot before positioning himself behind Anders with his robe held up in one hand.

He took Anders without preparation, driving his cock into him despite the way his body clamped down in an attempt to forestall the act. The salve was lubrication enough to minimize the discomfort for Varron, but Anders…?

His cries of pain were everything Varron had dreamed in his darkest nights.

“I will have you here,” he growled at Anders’ back. “I will have you in Lowtown in some slum doorway. I will bend you over in the privy in the Hanged Man with Varric’s voice coming through the door and I will make you cry out my name.”

He fisted his fingers in Anders’ hair and pulled his head back in a long, straining arc. “I will take you to Hightown and have you against the wall outside the Rose. You will suck me on the steps into the viscount’s keep. I’ll have you on your knees in the Docks with the sounds of the workers just around the corner.”

He punctuated each sentence with a hard thrust, burying himself in Anders. The lack of preparation left him tight and making little whimpering noises in his throat with every movement.

“And when I’m through with you, you will thank me.”

Anders was hot inside even if his body was cold where the air touched his naked skin. Varron closed his eyes to focus on the tight clench and heat. How the man could be so tight inside and so soft and yielding at the same time was a mystery for the ages.

The pleasure built inside him, drawing every nerve in his body tight with his cock as the winding key. His fingers dug bruises into Anders hair when he lost his rhythm to the shocks that jolted down his thighs, up his ribs to make his heart pound, and juddered up his spine to throw his head back with a howl of triumph in his orgasm.

Then Varron pulled away from Anders and dropped his robe, sparing a glance for the man where he still stood, shaking and braced against the wall. He smiled to realize that he had finally exorcised the ghost of whatever he had once felt for him.

“Get dressed,” he said curtly, moving to wash his hands in the basin Anders kept for washing his hands between patients. “You’ll move your things into Hightown today. Tomorrow we will go looking for your sela petrae.”

Anders turned to look at him and Varron smiled at the flicker of surprise that showed he hadn’t destroyed everything the man had once been.

“Mages will have their revolution.” He left the basin filled with bloodied water and shook the droplets off his hands. “And their martyr.”


End file.
